Auerbach in Exile

David Damrosch

Comparative Literature, Vol. 47, No. 2. (Spring, 1995), pp. 97-117.

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SPRING 1995 Volume 4'7, Number 2

DAVID D-WROSCH

Auerbach in Exile

FEW WORKS of modern literary criticism have been so widely admired as Erich Auerbach's masterwork Mimesis, and yet

Auerbach has found surprisingly few followers. Though Mimesis is one of a handful of works that defined comparative literature in the postwar era, the scholars who continue to cite and to study the book show little interest in doing anything of the kind themselves. The book lives on, in effect, only in fragments; while people will dispute or refine an argument in one or another of Auerbach's chapters, the book as a whole has not inspired further work of comparable range or synoptic ambition. The case of Mimesis is part of a more general question: why have the students of such generalists as Auerbach, Ernst Robert Curtius, and Leo Spitzer confined themselves to far narrower fields of study? Auerbach's exile in Istanbul seems, in retrospect, to have been neither so pro- longed nor so complete as his book's later exile here in America. Why is this so?

We may observe that, as early as the publication of Frye's Anatomy ofcriticism in 195'7, theory began to eclipse literary history as the ground of broad, generalizing work. Yet the question re- mains why this shift occurred to begin with. One might go further and say that even at the time Auerbach was writing Mimesis, the era of the philological method had ended, and no new generation was being trained to do his kind of work even if they wanted to. This is Edward Said's view, for example, in a recent article on the state of literary studies. Even as he argues that "the tiresome wheel-spin- ning and elaboration" of much literary theory have gotten out of hand by now, he adds a caveat:

This is not to say that wc should rcturn to traditional philological and scholarly approaches to literature. No one is really educated to do that honestly anymore, for if you use Erich Auerbach and Leo Spitrer as your models you had better bc familiar with eight or nine languages and most of the literatures writtcn in them, as well as archival, editorial, semantic, and stylistic skills that disappeared in Eu- rope at least two generations ago. ("News ol the World" 14)

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Auerbach and Spitzer themselves felt uncertain as to whether their methods could be transplanted to this country, a concern Spitzer directly expressed as early as 1951 in his uncomfortable article "The Formation of an American Humanist." Yet there are still many fields, from Classics to Indic studies, where no one thinks it remarkable for scholars to be expected to master half a dozen or more languages, and in which philological method re- tains a broad prestige. The real question is why students of Euro- pean literature no longer feel it important to retain these skills. Equally, many scholars do still practice "traditional scholarly ap- proaches to literature" -but almost always in relatively narrowly defined fields and periods, without the grand historical sweep of an Auerbach, a Curtius, or indeed a Northrop Frye. Why do people no longer feel that a clear view of the whole is a necessary basis for the study of individual moments in the history of Euro- pean literature?

Of course, in order to consider a view of the whole as necessary, we would first of all need to feel that it is possible. Can one ad- equately survey the long history of Western European literature (not to range more widely still) without one's own parochial con- cerns and competencies distorting the picture to an unacceptable degree? From the first, even Auerbach's admirers had an uneasy sense that what he was attempting, however brilliantly and movingly presented, was inherently impossible. My argument here will be that Auerbach shared his readers' uncertainty to a surpris- ing degree; Mimesis itself is deeply divided as to the nature and even the viability of its own project. The tensions within Auerbach's work may have strengthened his early readers' inclina- tion to focus on more circumscribed bodies of material, yet his students did not resolve those tensions but merely displaced them when they turned to specialized work and to literary theory. Auerbach's problems are very much with us to this day, and exam- ining them can have more than historical interest.

Like much current work, Mimesis is caught in a double bind be- tween scholarly objectivity and personal commitment, fidelity to history versus the shaping force of the scholar's own moment. Auerbach both reveals and represses his own present reality as he investigates "the representation of reality in Western literature." He set himself, in fact, an impossible task: to become an objective relativist, faithful to his texts on their own terms while also ac- knowledging his own role as observer and interpreter, a role placed under particular stress by the exigencies of the Second

AUERBACH

World War. Watching Auerbach's efforts to negotiate these treach- erous waters can give us a vantage point to assess our own efforts, rarely more successful than Auerbach's, to do justice both to the traditions we have received and to the needs of our contemporary cultural moment.

Begun in exile in 1942 and completed in April 1945 (the very month of Hitler's death), Mimesis stands as an affirmation of the scholar's ability to rise above every obstacle that adverse historical circumstances can present. Or, to put it differently: Auerbach re-sponds to the loss of his homeland and the collapse of his scholarly world through the recreation of European culture, both in the evocation of texts from across the tradition and by the display of humanistic scholarship at its best, with analyses at once judicious and loving, objective and deeply personal. As Said's long, ambiva- lent interest in Auerbach attests, the book's power was by no means limited to the early postwar years. Over the years, Mimesis has seemed to many to be the essence and the culmination of liter- ary analysis, literary history, and comparative literature, all rolled into one.

More than that: Mimesis is an entire world. Auerbach's readers were drawn into this world first and foremost by his voice, so often labelled "magisterial," yet curiously intimate as well, with its strangely intoxicating blend of ironic detachment and moral ur- gency. Then too, to read Mimesis is to live in its world for a long while, and this world, like Proust's, is a true modernist heter- ocosm: not an alien world, but our own world made new. Our world, in fact, both lost and found at once: the loss symbolized by the cataclysm of the Second World War and Auerbach's own exile during it, often hinted at in the body of the book and movingly brought forward in the epilogue, almost as an aside -"I may men- tion that the book was written during the war and at Istanbul"; and at the same time a recovery of that lost world, a recovery staged precisely through reading. Auerbach indicates as much in his clos- ing lines: "Nothing now remains but to find him - to find the reader, that is. I hope that my study will reach its readers -both my friends of former years, if they are still alive, as well as all others for whom it was intended. And may it contribute to bringing to- gether again those whose love for our western history has serenely persevered" (55'7).

Like Joyce, Auerbach filters this recreation of a library, a com- munity, and a history through an interpretation of the figure of Odysseus. In a reversal suggesting an inverse relation of scholar-

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ship to literature, he presents this return not at the end but in the very first words of his book: "Readers of the Odyssey will remember the well-prepared and touching scene in book 19,when Odysseus has at last come home, the scene in which the old housekeeper Euryclea, who had been his nurse, recognizes him by a scar on his thigh" ( 3 ) . The great modernist themes are here, in these opening words: reading, memory, the intimate linkage of form to emotion (well-prepared and touching), the cautious homecoming from a long exile (a nostos without nostalgia), the crucial value of recogni- tion, and the crystallization of all these themes in the reading of history in the message of the body, as figured in the scar on the hero's thigh.

Auerbach's focus, however, immediately shifts away from Odysseus to his wife Penelope and his nurse Euryclea, and in this we may sense as much of Woolf as of Proust and Joyce. Auerbach subtly invites us to see ourselves reflected more in the women than in Odysseus: it is they who observe, react, respond, they who tend Odysseus, they who have nurtured him, and the memory of him, all along. Odysseus may be the author of the scene of his home- coming, but the women are its interpreters, an audience who also must take part in the action. They must do so with understanding, sympathy, and tact, if the hero is to be restored to his home.

Like memory itself -her self, in Greek thought -Euryclea and Penelope are the muses of Odysseus's story. On Auerbach's first page (to adopt an appropriately stylistic analysis), Odysseus is the subject of five active verbs; Euryclea and Penelope are the subjects of fourteen. Woolf, who privileges the feminine eye and mind in this way, is the subject of Auerbach's final chapter, in which Joyce and Proust make brief appearances as well. As Bruce Robbins has noted, Auerbach often focuses on servants; his emphasis here on Euryclea as she tends Odysseus inaugurates a frame that will close with his long quotation from To the Lighthouse, in which Mrs. Ramsay talks with her son, measuring her knitting against his leg even as the maternal figure of Odysseus's nurse takes the measure of the scar on his thigh as she bathes him.

Long before we can begin to perceive the beauties of Auerbach's narrative structures, we are already seduced by his style, itself both his central subject and the ground of being of his own presentation. Auerbach's characterization of Homeric style could apply to his own writing as well: The separate elements of a phcrlomenon arc most clearly placcd in rclation to one another; a large number of conjunctions, advcrbs, particlcs, and other syntac-

AUERBACH

tical tools, all clearly circumscribed and delicately differentiated in meaning, de- limit persons, things, and portions of incidents in respect to onc anothcr, and at the same time bring them together in a continuous and ever flexible connection; likc the separate phcnomcna themsclvcs, thcir relationships - their temporal, local, causal, final, consecutive, comparativc, concessive, antithetical, and condi- tional limitations -arc brought to light in pcrfcct fullness; so that a continuous rhythmic procession of phenomena passes by, and never is therc a form lcft frag- mentary or half-illuminated, nevcr a lacuna, ncvcr a gap, ncvcr a glimpse of unplumbed depths. (6-7)

A compelling self-portrait and a suggestive portrayal of Homer at one and the same time; a harmonious marriage of objective de- scription and personal response?

The classicists among Auerbach's first readers were not so sure. Their problem stemmed from the fact that Auerbach is finally less interested in writing a histoly than a typology of realism. Homeric clarity and simplicity are opposed to biblical historicism, typified by Genesis, which Auerbach sees as displaying qualities of psycho- logical complexity, multiplicity of meanings, and concern with his- torical development. "The two styles," Auerbach concludes, "in their opposition, represent basic types"; further, in the case of Homer, "the basic tendencies of the Homeric style, which we have attempted to work out, remained effective and determinant down into late antiquity" (23) . Auerbach's image of Greek culture is little changed from the rounded totality posited by Georg Lukiics in his Theoly of the Novel thirty years earlier, despite the substantial advances classical scholars had made in their historical under- standing in the meanwhile. His picture of Genesis similarly as- sumes a unified biblical historiography, passing silently over the findings of modern German biblical scholarship, with its emphasis on competing historiographic strands within the Pentateuch.

Reviewing Mimesis in 1950, Ludwig Edelstein took issue with Auerbach's sharp opposition between Hebraic and Hellenic, and with the unitary view of Greek culture that supports the opposi- tion: The pagan and Christian litcraturcs show a tendency to convcrge rather than to stand in diametric opposition to one another . . . The main differcncc bctwecn Aucrbach's evaluation of antiquity and the one I havc suggested is perhaps this: hc looks at antiquity with thc eye of the classicistic interpreter, while I am trying to look at it with the cye of the historian. In the classicistic vicw, thc ancient attitude is onc and unchangcablc . . . In the historical vicw, cvcn the fifth century is not a unity. (429,431)

Why would Auerbach so foreshorten his terms? In Literary Criti- cism and the Structure of Histwry, Geoffrey Green has argued that from the very first chapter of Mimesis, Auerbach is striving to reha-

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bilitate Western culture, and particularly Judeo-Christian culture, from the nationalistic Aryanism of the Nazis. Thus the apparently neutral juxtaposition of Genesis and the Odyssey serves as a power- ful, and polemical, counter to anti-Semitic dismissals of Jewish cul- ture, with Jewish psychological complexity and historical con- sciousness complementing-or even trumping-Winckelmannian Greek clarity and harmony.

There is evidence in Mimesis to support Green's thesis, but there is little in the book that supports it openly. Any direct cultural po- lemic in the book occurred not by Auerbach's wish but despite his own intentions. The contrast both with Spitzer and with Curtius is notable. The prefaces and opening chapters to their major works of the 1930s and 1940s locate their work within their own careers and their own times, emphasizing their anti-Nazi intent. Curtius first attacked the Nazi cultural program in a remarkable polemic, Deutscher Geist in Gefahr, which he published in 1932, on the eve of Hitler's accession to power His preface to European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1948) also stresses that his book "is not the product of purely scholarly interests, that it grew out of a concern for the preservation of Western culture" (viii). It is also notable that he made a point of publishing a version of this preface in 1945, as a sort of call to postwar cultural reconstruction, three years before the actual publication of the book.

Spitzer prefers to rise above political disputes as such, but he does so in such a way as to emphasize both individual freedom and cultural commonality. Thus, his Essays in Historical Semantics, pub- lished in the United States in 1948, consists of six essays, three written in English and three written in German. He leaves the Ger- man essays untranslated - in order, he tells us in his preface, "to attract scholars in German and English toward that common stock of European semantics that informs our vocabulary; in this volume all nations will appear as equal citizens of 'quella Roma onde Cristo i. Romano"' (13-14). As important as commonality for Spitzer is personal liberty, typified by his remarkable suggestion in "Linguistics and Literary History" that his autobiographical essay is his "Mein Kampf; as it were -without dictatorial connotations, of course" (1). This is a bold gesture indeed: Spitzer's sovereign scholarly liberty will be such that Hitler will be unable to deny him even the use of his own autobiography - stripped of its "dictato- rial connotations," no less.

Auerbach's approach is very different. He takes us without any preface directly into his discussion of Homer. Contemporary his-

AUERBACH

tory figures only in passing, as providing illuminating contrasts to issues in the works under discussion rather than as the overriding context and shaping force that Green believes them to be. In his Epilogue, Auerbach speaks of the evolution of his subject almost entirely as an intellectual problem of shaping and of presentation; even his mentioning of the war serves only (or "only") to explain why he lacked adequate library facilities.

Just how, then, does the war enter into his book? I would like to draw attention to three basic ways in which Auerbach reflects his times: through explicit analogies; through implicit guiding of se- lections; and through an often unconscious shaping -and even distortion - of his interpretations. This third sort of case is the really problematic one, but Auerbach's direct analogies, and his ambiguous comments on his principles of selection, already show the delicacy of the problems involved. On the level of direct refer- ence, Auerbach allows his moral passion and his contemporary concern to appear in the form of analogies, particularly analogies that clarify the difference between past ages and the present. To give one example: Whcncvcr a spccific form of lifc or a social group has run its course, or has only lost favor and support, cvery injustice which the propagandists perpetrate against it is half consciously fclt to bc what it actually is, yct pcoplc welcornc it with sadistic delight. Gottfricd Kcller dcscribcs this psychological situation very fincly in one of thc rlovcllas of his Seldwyla cycle, thc story of lost laughtcr, i n which a campaign of defamation is discussed. I t is true, thc things hc dcscribcs cornparc with what we have seen in our time as a slight turbidity in the clear water of a brook would cornparc with an ocean of filth and blood . . . Kcllcr was fortunate in that hc could not imagine an important change of govcrnmcnt which would not entail ari cx- pansion of freedom. We have bccn shown otherwise. (404)

As explicit as Auerbach is prepared to be in such contrasts, he usually refrains from any direct comment when the analogy would strike closer to home. In his chapter on Shakespeare, for example, he opens with a passage from Henry Part 1,discussing the every- day realism that shows through despite Shakespeare's persisting attachment to noble figures as his protagonists. He then abruptly devotes a page and a half to Shylock, whom he describes as "a bor- derline case": "To be sure, in terms of his class, he is not a com- mon or everyday figure; he is a pariah; but his class is low. The slight action of the Merchant of Venice, with its fairy-tale motifs, is almost too heavily burdened by the weight and problematic impli- cations of his character" (314).Far from drawing any direct com- parison to contemporary treatments of Jews, Auerbach doesn't even mention that Shylock is a Jew until the tail end of the discus-

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sion, and then only to contrast Shylock to Marlowe's Jew of Malta. In his discussion, "race" (as the Nazis would have described Jewish identity) is recoded in terms of class and personal character.

This treatment of Shylock can be seen either as a retreat from the problem -a virtual denial that Shylock is a Jew at all - or as an implicit defense of Shylock (his weaknesses stem not from his ethnicity but from his character, or from Shakespeare's inability to give lower-class figures true tragic depth). In either event, it is clear that Auerbach prefers to draw a direct analogy to contempo- rary society when the situation differs sufficiently from the present that he can maintain a clear distance between his time and the events in the text. In the end, Auerbach treats Shylock's Judaism with something of the "heedless Olympian serenity" which he sees as characterizing Shakespeare's own treatment of Shylock's tragic situation (314). As Carl Landauer has put it, Auerbach's discus- sion of Shylock displays "a strained objectivity . . . a sort of self- conscious lack of self-consciousness" (95n.).

Auerbach is consistently reluctant to allow his personal con- cerns to intrude whenever they might distort his view of the past -even to the point that this distancing may itself constrain his dis- cussion, as in the case of his treatment of Shylock. Yet he was well aware that a scholar's perspective cannot simply be turned on and off at will. His drive toward synoptic completeness was fueled by his hope that the totality of literary history could ultimately resist, and guide, his own relativism. This hope can be seen in one of his major methodological statements of the 1950s, "Vico's Contribu- tion to Literary Criticism": Our historistic way of feeling and judging is so deeply rooted in us that we have ceased to be aware of it. We erljoy the art, the poetry and the music of many differ- ent periods and peoples with equal preparedness for understanding . . . The variety of periods and civilizations no longer frightens us: neither the critics and historians nor an important, continually increasing part of the general public . . . Historical relativism has a twofold aspect: it concerns the understanding historian as well as the phenomena to be understood. This is an extreme relativism; but we should not fear i t . . . Only in the entirety of history is there truth, and only by the understanding of its whole course may one obtain it. (33-37)

It is somewhat ironic that later scholars have focused on period- based studies as more "honest" (to recall Said's phrase) than broad literary history, which they presumably feel is too likely to be shaped by ungrounded projections of the generalizer's precon- ceptions. Auerbach believed just the reverse: that only the totality of the tradition could provide a check against the interpreter's rage to (re)order the material at hand.

AUERBACH

In the Epilogue to Mimesis, Auerbach both stresses and limits the role of his personal concerns in the shaping of his book: The method of textual interpretation gives the interpreter a certain leeway. He can choose and emphasize as he pleases. It must naturally be possible to find what he claims in the text. My interpretations are no doubt guided by a specific pur- pose. Yet this purpose assumed form only as I went along, playing as it were with my texts, and for long stretches of my way I have been guided only by the texts themselves. Furthermore, the great majority of the texts were chosen at random, or1 the basis of accidental acquaintance and preference rather than irl view of a definite purpose. (556)

In principle, Auerbach is perfectly willing to acknowledge the shaping force of his interests and of his own historical moment, but in practice he displays a deep ambivalence whenever that shaping goes beyond an almost random selection of themes and texts and begins to affect the actual interpretation of the material.

The ambiguity of Auerbach's relation to what we might call the otherness of his material was not lost on his early reviewers. Helmut Hatzfeld, for example, criticized Auerbach for reading the Chanson de Roland "with the eyes of an enlightened pacifist" (335). More generally, Reni. Wellek, in a review filled with faint praise, wrote that Mimesis "must be judged as something of a work of art, as a personal commonplace or rather uncommonplace book," adding that "his results are peculiarly shifting and discon- certingly vague" (300, 305). Charles Muscatine spoke glowingly of Mimesis as "one of those rare books that speak to everyone in the literate world," and yet he found the book "strikingly ambivalent . . . The book contains a wealth of historical data, and repeated rec- ommendations of historicism, yet it is itself only semi-history. At its center is something intuitive and creative, aesthetic, even moral, though for himself Auerbach treats 'ethical' literature tangen- tially and even slightingly. This is the book's encompassing am- bivalence" (448,456).

Auerbach's ambivalence was still apparent when he responded to his first reviewers, in an article called "Epilegomena zu Mime-sis," published in 1954. In this article, he was especially concerned to counter charges that his representation of the history of realism had been skewed by personal biases. To critics who claimed that he had understated the extent of realism in classical antiquity, he replied that those readers had failed to understand the kind of re- alism he was discussing. "Perhaps I should rather have spoken of 'existential realism,"' he continues, "but I was reluctant to employ this all-too-contemporary term for phenomena of the distant past" (4). "Existential realism," a term openly expressive of a modern

105

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perspective, is thus a term he both suggests and withholds. Auerbach returns to the problem of his perspective later in the

article, but modulates the issue to one of generalization: "abstract, comprehensive concepts falsify and destroy the phenomena. The order must develop in such a way that it allows the individual phe- nomena to live freely. If it had been possible, I would not have employed any general terms whatsoever" (15-16). He continues by praising the nineteenth century's renunciation of "any absolute, externally-imposed judgment of phenomena as unhistorical and dilletantish" (17). The slippage in Auerbach's usage of key terms like Wirklichkeit stems in part from his ambivalence concerning his role in shaping his narrative, an ambivalence that also yields an overall narrative progression variously described either as sym- phonic (Holdheim) or as chaotic (Landauer). Neither character- ization alone suffices; to an unusual extent, Mimesis must be read along both registers at once.

This doubleness is at once Auerbach's achievement and his fail- ure. Paul Bov6 may be right in seeing iMimesis as "an engaged his- tory of the present meant to intervene authoritatively in moder- nity" (Intellectuals in Power, 89). Yet it appears that such an engage- ment proceeded largely in spite of Auerbach's own conscious wishes. The "strange failure," as Bovk calls it (99), of Auerbach's early commentators to appreciate the political force of the book is less strange, on the whole, than Auerbach's own blindness to the shaping power of his cultural-political concerns. We have seen Auerbach's assertion that his texts shaped his topic more than he did himself: his texts were chosen "at random," his themes devel- oped through "play," under the guidance of the books themselves. On closer examination, however, his choices of texts rarely look so very random, even when less charged figures than Shylock are in- volved.

Consider "The World in Pantagruel's Mouth," one of the most famous of his chapters. Auerbach centers his discussion of Rabelais on a long passage describing Monsieur Alcofrybas's jour- ney into Pantagruel's mouth, where he encounters whole cities and landscapes. A splendid passage for a discussion of Rabelais's techniques, to be sure; but hardly randomly chosen. Auerbach be- gins a few paragraphs into the chapter from which he is quoting, just in time to give Alcofrybas's reaction to the strange sights he saw: "But, oh gods and goddesses, what did I see there! Jupiter confound me with his trisulk lightning if I lie! I walked there as they do in Sophie, at Constantinople" (264).

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Only in the Epilogue does Auerbach mention that he has writ- ten his book in Istanbul - the modern name of Constantinople. The parallel between himself and Alcofrybas (a character who is a disguised author figure, "Alcofrybas Nasier" being an anagram of "Fran~ois Rabelais") may be unconscious, or may be a private irony that gives a personal resonance to the selection. But this par- allel also affects his discussion, in which it begins to seem as though Auerbach is recreating Alcofrybas in his own image. On emerging from Pantagruel's mouth, Alcofrybas describes what he has seen on his six-month visit, during which time a war has been raging in the outer world. Questioned by Pantagruel as to how he has kept himself alive, he cheerfully admits that he has both eaten some of Pantagruel's food and also relieved himself within his master's mouth. Pantagruel, as Auerbach puts it, "good- humoredly rewards his undaunted admission concerning his def- ecations with the gift of a chatelleny - although our honest Alcofrybas had, so to speak, found himself a cushy job for the du- ration of the war" (26'7).

Auerbach's descriptions of characters, and particularly of char- acters who resemble their authors, often sound like self-portraits. As Thomas Hart has said, Mimesis is "a gallery of heroes, and he- roes of the most varied kinds," in whom we are invited to redis- cover our own potential experience ("Insight and Method," 25'7-58); more particularly, these heroes reflect the actual experience of the critic who has assembled this gallery. In their multiplicity, Auerbach's heroes come to express elements both of his historical experience and of his response to it. If Alcofrybas provides a comic analogue to Auerbach's wartime experience, other characters present a more somber picture. Throughout his career, Auerbach was centrally concerned with Dante, "poet of the secular world" as he saw him in his early book of that title. By the time of Mimesis, we find a complex overlay of Dante's characters, Dante the author, and Auerbach himself. Consider Farinata and Cavalcante in the Inferno: Their eternal and changeless fate is the same; but only in the sense that they have to suffer the same punishment, only in an objective sense. For they accept their fate in very different ways. Farinata wholly disregards his situation; Cavalcante, in his blind prison, mourns for the beauty of light; and each, in gesture and word, completely reveals the nature proper to each, which can be and is none other than that which each possessed in his life upon earth. And still more: from the fact that earthly life has ceased so that it cannot change or grow, whereas the passions and inclinations which animated it still persist without ever being released in action, there results as it were a tremendous concentration . . . Dante, then, took over

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earthly historicity into his beyond; his dead are cut off from the earthly present and its vicissitudes, but memory and the most intense interest in it stirs them so profoundly that the atmosphere of the beyond is charged with it. (192-93)

This seems to me a perfect description of the presence of Auerbach's own European past (or his vanished present) within his Istanbul masterwork. In contrast to the cosmopolitan Spitzer, Auerbach never lost his sense that the center of his world was Eu- rope, and not merely Europe in general but Germany in particu- lar. As he later said of Mimesis, "it is not a German book in its lan- guage alone . . . It arose from the themes and methods of German intellectual history and philology; it would not have been think- able in any other tradition than in that of Hegel and the Ger- man Romantics; it would never have been written without the influences which I experienced in my youth in Germany" ("Epilegomena" 15).

In Auerbach we see both the stern serenity of Farinata and the melancholy passion of Cavalcante: wholly disregarding his situa- tion, at the same time he is inseparably attached to the world he has lost. Even the structure of Mimesis is comparable to that of the Inferno: guided by Auerbach, as Dante is by Virgil, we travel from one area to the next, and at each stop a text arises and announces itself, in a single passage from which Auerbach then draws its whole being. Mimesis as a whole radiates out from the chapter on Dante, that greatest of writers-in-exile.

Auerbach's discussion of Dante stands on the borderline of the problem of the shaping consciousness. Who, finally, has shaped whom the most? To the extent that Dante has inspired Auerbach's method and themes, the chapter illustrates Auerbach's own theory of his method. To the extent, though, that the shaping has gone in the opposite direction, modernity may invade the repre- sentation of the past in a way that would violate Auerbach's histori- cist creed. I do not find that a consideration of Auerbach's per- sonal stake in the discussion detracts in any way from the lucidity, the brilliance, or the persuasiveness of his analysis of Farinata and Cavalcante. It does, on the other hand, help to explain the chapter's one real weakness, Auerbach's inability to do justice to the least visible yet most pervasive character in the Commedia: God.

As striking as Auerbach's sensitivity to the humanity of Dante's characters is his lack of sympathy for the poem's theology. From his exposition, we see Farinata as a noble exile, but we would scarcely imagine he had done anything wrong on earth. Auerbach closes his chapter, in fact, by cleconstructing the entire theological

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framework in which Dante places his characters: Their eternal position in the divine order is something of which we are only con- scious as a setting whose irrevocability can but serve to heighten the effect of their humanity, preserved for us in all its force. The result is a direct experience of life which overwhelms everything else . . . an illumination of man's impulses and pas- sions which leads us to share in them without restraint and indeed to admire their variety and their greatness.

And by virtue of this immediate and admiring sympathy with man, the principle, rooted in the divine order, of the indestructibility of the whole historical and indi- vidual man turns against that order, makes it subservient to its own purposes, and obscures it. The image of man eclipses the image of God. Dante's work made man's Christian-figural being a reality, and destroyed it in the very process of real- izing it. The tremendous pattern was broken by the overwhelming power of the images it had to contain. (201-2)

These are astonishing claims. The Romantic admiration of a few free-thinking figures like Francesca da Rimini and Brunetto Latini is here extended to all of the sinners in hell, whom we are sup- posed to admire "without restraintUl Needless to say, alternative readings of the Commedia were possible at the time Auerbach was writing; compare Curtius's treatment of Dante in his European Lit-erature, where the stress is very largely on the theological elements Auerbach believes have been obscured by the power of Dante's art. What are we to make of Auerbach's selectivity, an emphasis amounting to outright distortion?

In part, Auerbach's analysis is more an expression of his per- sonal preferences (in this instance, his secular humanism) than an inherent and inevitable response to the text-in-itself. More par- ticularly, it seems as though God is a source of discomfort for Auerbach less as an ethical force than as an ordering force. What Auerbach stresses is not so much the obscuring of the divine mo- rality as the individual's power to overturn the divine order. We can see played out here a version of Auerbach's ambivalence to- ward his own shaping activity: withholding, as he believes, any prior or external conceptual ordering, he allows himself to be guided by his texts; the phenomena, "allowed to live freely," create such order as they choose for themselves and do not allow it to dominate them.

In Auerbach's eyes, Dante tried to do just the opposite, to im- pose God's order on his characters, only to have the characters' ineluctable individuality triumph over the divine aggression that would put them forever in their places. Against the fascist insis- tence on the purified collective will, Auerbach finds in Dante the origin of modern individualism: "he opened the way for that aspi- ration toward autonomy which possesses all earthly existence. In

COMPARATI\IE LITERATURE

the very heart of the other world, he created a world of earthly beings and passions so powerful that it breaks bounds and pro- claims its independence" (200). Thus Auerbach has found - or rather created - in Dante a figure who has, in spite of himself, fostered individual autonomy over universal social control.

While Auerbach celebrates Dante for giving Farinata full voice, and Pantagruel for rewarding Alcofrybas for going his own way during the war, he conversely tends to erase authorial figures who order people's lives for them. This pattern may be seen in his chapter on Don Quixote, which he insists is a work of pure play, with no serious themes at all. In view of this emphasis, it is surprising that he has nothing to say about the character who is the overrid- ing focus of metafictional play: Cide Hamete Benengeli, the Ara- bic historian who is the supposed author of the book. Cervantes uses Benengeli, in fact, to parody the two sorts of ordering prin- ciples, ethical and historiographic, that Auerbach wishes to mini- mize. As a "lying dog of a Moor" who nonetheless swears oaths "as a Catholic Christian," Benengeli is a locus of both moral and histo- riographic ambiguity. (Is he telling the truth or distorting it? Must we correct for his ignorance or beware of his malice?) Further, as an historian who is also a sorcerer, he is an observer who can alter the events he describes.

Benengeli's relevance to Auerbach's exposition is increased by the fact that Auerbach himself steps out of his narrative concern- ing Cervantes to reflect on the importance of the historian's fidel- ity to the facts, and he does this precisely in the context of a book's changeability: A book like Don Quijotedissociates itself from its author's intention and leads a life of its own. Don Quijote shows a new face to every age which enjoys him. Yet the historian -whose task it is to define the place of a given work in a historical conti- nuity - must endeavor insofar as that is still possible, to attain a clear understanding of what the work meant to its author and his contemporaries. I have tried to interpret as little as possible. In particular, I have pointed out time and again how little there is in the text which can be called tragic and problem- atic. I take it as merry play on many levels, including in particular the level of everyday realism. (353-54)

Where is Benengeli when Auerbach needs him? Too close for comfort, it seems, for the very problems Auerbach here discusses are raised repeatedly in Don Quixote through the figure of the Semitic historian. The problem of a book leading "a life of its own" is exactly Don Quixote's problem at the start of Part 11, when he learns that Benengeli's Part I has already been published and has become a best-seller, so that he must now live up to the expecta-

AUERBACH

tions it has generated. As for the historian's duty "to attain a clear understanding" and to interpret as little as possible, it is striking that Hamete's difficulties in this regard form the subject of the opening paragraph of the very chapter from which Auerbach has taken his representative Cervantes passage. The chapter begins: When the author of this great history [i.e., Benengelil comes to relate the events of this chapter, he says that he would have liked to pass them over in silence, through fear of not being believed, for the delusions of Don Quixote here reach the greatest heights and limits imaginable, and even exceed those, great as they are, by two bow shots. However, he wrote them down finally, although not without fear and misgiving, just as they occurred, without adding or subtracting one atom of the truth from the history, or heeding any objection that might be brought against him as a liar. And he was right, for truth, though it may run thin, never breaks, and it always flows over the lie as oil over water. (558)

Auerbach, then, echoes Benengeli even as he suppresses him, and this double treatment of the historian is paralleled by his treat- ment of Don Quixote. Auerbach discusses Quixote twice in Mime-sis, in opposite terms. In his chapter on Chrktien de Troyes, he gives a sociological interpretation of Quixote's motives: Cervantes makes it perfectly clear, at the very beginning of his book, where the root of Don Quixote's confusion lies: he is the victim of a social order in which he belongs to a class that has no function. He belongs to this class; he cannot emanci- pate himself from it; but as a mere member of it, without wealth and without high connections, he has no role and no mission. He feels his life running meaning- lessly out, as though he were paralyzed. Only upon such a man, whose life is hardly better than a peasant's but who is educated and who is neither able nor permitted to labor as a peasant does, could romances of chivalry have such an unbalancing effect. His setting forth is a flight from a situation which is unbearable and which he has borne far too long. He wants to enforce his claim to the function proper to the class to which he belongs. (137)

Another self-portrait-all the more clearly so if, as in the discus- sion of Shylock, we consider that a class can be constituted on eth- nic as well as economic grounds. Yet in the actual chapter on Don Quixote, he argues against this viewpoint, seeing Quixote instead only as the focus of Cervantes's "merry play on many levels." Auerbach himself notes the contradiction, without resolving it: discussing Quixote's decision to set out as a knight-errant, he says that one might suppose that his mad decision represents a flight from a situation which has become unbearable, a violent attempt to emancipate himself from it. This sociological and psychological interpretation has been advocated by various writers on the subject. I myself advanced it in an earlier passage of this book, and I leave it there because in the context of that passage it is justified . . . That this should happen to a man in his fifties can be explained - from within the work -only in aesthetic terms, that is, through the comic vision which came to Cervantes

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

when he conceived the novel . . . (348-49)

Why the shift away from the sociological and psychological view to the very different view of Quixote as pure play? Alone among the chapters of the book, the Cervantes chapter was written after the war, added only in the second edition, apparently in a desire to close a perceived lacuna in the history of realism. It may be that the wartime composition of the "Chr6tien" chapter had provided a special impetus toward the stress on Quixote in flight from the unsupportable situation in which he is denied work, and is not even permitted to work as a manual laborer. What is most remark- able, however, is the fact that Auerbach lets both representations of Quixote stand - each one, moreover, presented as the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

The two Quixotes illustrate a fundamental duality throughout Mimesis. Everywhere in the book there is a tension between Olym- pian classicism and exilic modernism, and Auerbach continually oscillates between these perspectives. This duality is first staged in the contrast of Homer to the Bible. Homer's style is analyzed in great and loving detail, and I still think it fair to see Homer as a model for Auerbach's own style. As the chapter develops, however, Auerbach contrasts Homeric psychology most unfavorably with that found in Genesis. Discussing Abraham's reaction to the command to sacrifice Isaac, Auerbach says, Such a problematic psychological situation as this is impossible for any of the Homeric heroes, whose destiny is clearly defined and who wake every morning as if it were the first day of their lives: their emotions, though strong, are simple and find expression instantly.

How fraught with background, in comparison, are characters like Saul and David! . . . the Jewish writers are able to express the simultaneous existence of various layers of consciousness and the conflict between them. (12-13)

The Hebrew writers (whom Auerbach calls 'yewish," as though he were speaking of a much later period) excel at the very psycho- logical analysis of conflicting layers of consciousness that Auerbach will identify in his final chapter as the great skill of mod- ernists like Woolf and Joyce. They might, then, seem to be the he- roes of the piece (as Green and others have taken them to be), except that it is the Bible that strives for a totalitarian effect: The world of the Scripture stories is not satisfied with claiming to be a historically true reality - it insists that it is the only real world, is destined for autocracy. . . Scripture stories do not, like Homer's, court our favor, they do not flatter us that they may please and enchant us - they seek to subject us, and if we refuse to be subjected we are rebels. . . Far from seeking, like Homer, merely to make us forget our own reality for a few hours, [the Bible] seeks to overcome our reality: we are to

AUERBACH

fit our o w n l i fe into its world, feel ourselves t o be e lemrnts i n its structure o f uni- versal history. (14-15)

Throughout Mimesis, in many guises, there appears a conflict between two sets of values that Auerbach sets sharply against one another, but both of which he himself holds: classical (Greek) har- mony, order, balance, free play, and presence ("foregrounding," in his discussion of Homer); all in opposition to modernist (Jew- ish) fragmentation, psychological complexity, and exile or ab- sence. These latter traits may militate against the repressions that Aryan theorists were associating with a return to classical order; but they may also only reinforce those same tendencies. In his fi- nal chapter, Auerbach associates himself with Woolf's stream-of- consciousness technique, and her focus on small fragments of time and place: "It is possible to compare this technique of mod- ern writers with that of certain modern philologists who hold that the interpretation of a few passages from Hamlet, Phddre, or Faust can be made to yield more . . . than would a systematic and chrono- logical treatment" (548). He goes on, though, to suggest that the modernist retreat from system and chronology itself paved the way for the rise of fascism: "These forces threatened to split up and disintegrate. They lost their unity and clear definition . . . The temptation to entrust oneself to a single sect which solved all prob- lems with a single formula . . . was so great that, with many people, fascism hardly had to employ force when the time came for it to spread through the countries of old European culture, absorbing the smaller sects" (550).

The dualism of Auerbach's thought finds a structural expres- sion in the doubled frame-tale within which he encloses his book. I have already alluded to one of these frame-tales, in which Euryclea and Mrs. Ramsay become the foci for the discussions of Homer and Woolf. There is a second frame as well, corresponding to the other term of the first chapter, for the Bible is recalled in a second long quotation that Auerbach gives in his final chapter. The pas- sage comes from Proust, whom Auerbach introduces not to stress modernist subjectivity but on the contrary in order to give an ex- ample of the objectivity attainable by self-conscious recollection of a vanished past: A consciousness i n which remembrance causes past realities t o arise, which has long since le f t beh ind t h e states i n which i t found itself w h e n those realities oc- curred as a present, sees and arranges that content i n a way very d i f f eren t f r o m t h e purely individual and suh,jective. Freed f r o m its various earlier involvements , con- sciousness views its o w n past layers and their con ten t i n perspective; it keeps confronting t h e m with o n e another, emancipating t h e m f r o m their exterior t em-

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

poral continuity as well as from the narrow meanings they seemed to have when they were bound to a particular present. (542)

Another self-portrait, it appears: the observer, seeing and "arrang- ing" (but not distorting) events of the vanished past, "emanci- pates" them from time by viewing them "in perspective"; we may recall that Auerbach's favorite term for his own method is "perspectivism." The passage Auerbach gives to illustrate this per- spectival objectivity is an interesting one indeed: he chooses a long paragraph from the opening section of the Recherche, in which the young narrator, desperately longing for his mother's company, has been banished to his room for the night; unexpectedly, through his father's arbitrary whim, he is allowed to spend the night with his mother rather than alone.

Auerbach arranges to begin this quotation with a highly appro- priate image: "It was impossible for me to thank my father; what he called my sentimentality would have exasperated him. I stood there not daring to move; he was still confronting us, an immense figure in his white nightshirt . . . standing like Abraham in the engraving after Benozzo Gozzoli which M. Swann had given me, telling Sarah that she must tear herself away from Isaac" (543-44). Now, this metaphor recalls the very scene from Genesis with which Auerbach has begun his book: the Akhedah, "the Binding of Isaac." If Euryclea and Mrs. Ramsay form a feminine frame for his book, this frame is in turn paired with the patriarchal binding of Isaac, first in its biblical form and then in its metaphorical recre- ation in Proust.

As Shalom Spiegel has eloquently shown in The Last Trial,Jews since antiquity have turned to the Akhedah in times of persecu- tion, finding in ever renewed interpretations of that enigmatic story ways to come to terms with God's willingness to countenance his people's destruction. Auerbach has a private hope, the hope of many Jews in many times of persecution: that like Isaac he and his beloved lost world may yet be snatched from destruction, freed from the bondage of death. So far, this private hope need not im- pinge in a problematic way on his reading of Proust, since the nec- essary elements are all there in the passage he cites, in which Proust describes how the vanished past lives on in memory and in memory alone.

But Auerbach has misquoted the passage. I have given the lines in their correct form above, but this is how Auerbach himself has transcribed, or remembered, the metaphor: "standing like Abraham in the engraving after Benozzo Gozzoli which M. Swann

AUERBACH

had given me, telling Hagar that she must tear herself away from Isaac" (544; French text on 543). Auerbach gives us the wrong wife. In order to harmonize the passage and its translation, Willard Trask quietly altered the Moncrieff translation of Proust that he used in his English version; the error has stood uncorrected in subsequent German editions as well, and I do not know of any published discussion of it. This is, however, a resonant slippage of transcription or of memory. Auerbach has not only a secret hope but also a secret fear: that he may most resemble Abraham's other "first-born" son, Ishmael, reprieved from death only to be sent with Hagar into a permanent exile in the wilderness (Genesis 21:20).

Writing his great book in Istanbul, Auerbach both responded to his exile and refused to submit to it. But he was wrong as to the nature of this exile: his problem was not that he was cut off from earthly life like Alcofrybas, Farinata, Quixote, the Proustian narra- tor, all of whom in varying ways recover this loss through memory, stories, interpretation. Auerbach's exile is the reverse: far more irrevocably wedded to his present age than he would wish to be, he lives in exile from the past, from the worlds of his beloved texts, which cannot finally provide an Olympian refuge from the dual tyrannies of time and of political pressures.

Amid the ringing affirmations of the power of perspective in his article on Vico, Auerbach includes a disquieting aside: after tell- ing us that "the variety of periods and civilizations no longer frightens us," he adds: "It is true that perspectivistic understand- ing fails as soon as political interests are at stake; but otherwise, especially in esthetic matters, our historistic capacity of adaptation to the most various forms of beauty is almost boundless" (34). The absolutes in this sentence are striking: perspectivism does not merely falter, it fails, and it does so not gradually butjust as soon as political interests are at stake.

For a generation, Auerbach's readers shared his deep wish for an objectivity unswayed by political interests, for an historicism all the more profound as it could transcend its own time-boundedness. Little wonder that they admired but did not imitate his synthetic project, and turned to far more circumscribed fields of study, in the hope that more knowledge of a more manageable body of material could enable them truly to escape themselves and do justice to the material on its own terms. Little wonder, too, that they did not succeed. The specialized projects characteristic of scholarly work in recent decades have not resolved but only

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

masked the contradictions we can now see in Auerbach's work, while the global generalizations in which local readings are now often framed give these contradictions a new urgency. To return to Mimesis now is to be warned that our own perspective can all too easily harm the books we wish to bring to life, even as Auerbach illustrates (in part deliberately) the reasons why an outright era- sure of our perspective is unattainable and undesirable. The chal- lenge for us is to find ways, by facing the problem squarely, to see the benefits of our own perspective while resisting our often unre- flective will to power over our material.

Auerbach's problem was not that he knew too little, about Dante or even about the Bible; he knew too much about his own times, and that knowledge, so often repressed, continually returned to shift the course of his argument away from the free play of the material in itself. Though Auerbach takes up Homer and the Bible without any prefatory remarks, he does begin with an epigraph, from Marvell: "Had we but world enough and time . . ." His wish was granted only too well: there is, in Auerbach's terms, all too much world within his book, all too much of his own time. Thanks to the work of Said and others, we are now willing to advance an openly worldly criticism, and we can see more directly than could Auerbach and his early readers the extent of the shaping force of our own moment, our own needs. This shaping force can enrich our work, as it has enriched Mimesis more than Auerbach himself desired, but it can also impoverish it, if we simply recreate past works in our own image, or reject out of hand any that we cannot readily bend to our will. The best corrective to such a narrowing of our outlook may well be to recover Auerbach's breadth and gener- osity of perspective, too often foreshortened through a focus on a single period or a few favorite theorists. Mimesis may now, finally, begin to find its true readers.

Columbia University

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